The Mistreatment of Aboriginal Canadians in Colonial Canada

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The Mistreatment of Aboriginal Canadians in Colonial Canada.

        In 1849 white-Aboriginal relationships were considered evil by the British Empire. This type of racial intolerance was commonly directed at the settler colonies where white settler men without “proper” white women might look to the indigenous peoples for relationships. Even more intolerant than accusing the relationship of being evil, if the relationship produced a child, a mixed-race child would be considered even lower on the British class system than the Aboriginals. This type of racial intolerance is what breeds inequality and racism in the future. Some specific examples of how the Aboriginal people were mistreated are explained in On the Edge of Empire chapter 6 “Fair Ones of a Purer Caste”: Bringing White Women to British Colombia. The chapter explains how the British Empire replaced Aboriginal women with white women to prevent Aboriginal reproduction, the British Empire replaced Aboriginal workers with immigrant labour to take away Aboriginals' livelihood and the British Empire created and propagated falsehoods that besmirched and degraded Aboriginals and the Aboriginal way of life. These actions which many consider to be “in the past” are what continue to influence the mistreatment of Aboriginal Canadians today.

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        In On the Edge of Empire, Adele Perry makes it obvious that the white elites in

British Colombia and England saw the interracial relationships between white men and Aboriginal women to be a problem that needed to be fixed. They decide the necessary course of action was to bring boat loads of white women to British Colombia to distract the men from Aboriginal women and straighten out this wayward settler society. These boat loads of women would be taken from England where they felt there was a “surplus” of unmarried women; this is an example of how women were objectified. This ...

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